Endangered Firefox: The State of Mozilla

I’ve been using some form of Firefox or its ancestors for 20 years, and I just cannot understand its decreasing popularity. In terms of performance, feature-richness, customizability, etc it seems to be superior to the more popular browsers. Can it really all be explained by the fact that it isn’t “pushed” by being an OS default (Edge, Safari) or by being suggested by the world’s most popular search engine (Chrome)? I don’t know what I’d do without Tree Style Tabs and the ability to irresponsibly open hundreds of tabs without worrying that the RAM usage is going to crash the browser!

I recently switched back to Firefox from Chrome. The reasons I switched to Chrome to begin with...

- Firefox was slower

- Worse, Firefox was laggier, with a drunk feeling when interacting with UI elements

- Firefox became increasingly buggy. For about two years it was impossible to use Firefox with a PIV/CAC card on Mac (after they broke loading external security modules and before security.osclientcerts.autoload / security.enterprise_roots.enabled were stable)

- Breaking webpages intentionally with "experiments" (Mr. Robot)

- Forcing Pocket down your throat

- Other similar user-hostile behavior

I'm glad Firefox is better again, and I'm glad to be back on it, but it's a bit ridiculous to wage war on your users and then wonder why you lose market share.

Unfortunately the article talks about data collected using statistical instruments that are currently blocked by Firefox.

Why doesn't Mozilla offer a paid version? I use my browser more than any other application on my computer...